Author Dave Eggers told a room of around 200 OpenAI staffers that ChatGPT is silencing a generation of student writers and has made teachers' work 'catastrophic,' according to the Financial Times. Sam Altman personally invited Eggers to give the talk last year, and Eggers used the platform to deliver a sustained critique of the product powering the company that had booked him.
Eggers is the founder of McSweeney's, the author of The Circle — a 2013 novel widely read as a critique of the tech industry — and the founder of multiple schools and nonprofits supporting young writers. His remarks to OpenAI targeted both the classroom impact of ChatGPT and its effect on how students learn to compose original work.
Speaking to the staffers, Eggers said the past two years have transformed what teachers face day to day. He framed the shift as an involuntary burden imposed on educators rather than a productivity gain, and pinned it directly on ChatGPT's release and rapid adoption in schools.
“The effect of ChatGPT on educators' lives is catastrophic. Whether you intended to do it or not, you've made every teacher's life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago.”— Dave Eggers, Author and McSweeney's founder
Key facts
- 01Sam Altman invited author Dave Eggers to speak to around 200 OpenAI staffers last year.
- 02Eggers told the room ChatGPT's effect on educators has been 'catastrophic' over the past two years.
- 03He argued students using ChatGPT to compose are being 'silenced' and losing the ability to write in their own voice.
- 04Eggers, who founded McSweeney's, has previously called AI-generated writing 'pastiche nonsense.'
- 05His 2013 novel The Circle is a well-known critique of the tech industry.
The sharper edge of the speech dealt with students themselves. Eggers argued that when students use ChatGPT to write for them, they lose the ability to develop their own voice — a process he described as central to learning how to think, not just how to produce text.
He returned to the point repeatedly, casting AI-assisted composition as a theft of the developmental work that turns a student into a writer. Eggers has previously described AI-generated prose as 'pastiche nonsense,' a phrase consistent with his framing that the technology produces surface-level output at the cost of the underlying skill.
“If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they'll never learn to write. And their voice is stolen from them.”— Dave Eggers, Author and McSweeney's founder
Altman almost certainly knew what he was inviting. Eggers has spent more than a decade publicly skeptical of Silicon Valley's expansionist tendencies, and The Circle remains one of the most-cited fictional critiques of the surveillance-and-scale playbook that defines modern platforms. Booking him to address OpenAI staff was less a debate than a chosen provocation.
OpenAI has not publicly responded to the specifics of Eggers' remarks, and the Financial Times account is the primary source for the quotes. The company has previously argued that ChatGPT can be used constructively in education when paired with teacher guidance, and it markets a dedicated ChatGPT Edu tier to universities and school districts.
The disconnect between that pitch and Eggers' account is the interesting part. OpenAI's education strategy assumes the tool augments learning; Eggers told the people building it that, in his direct observation, it is doing the opposite — replacing the act of writing rather than supporting it. Teachers, in his telling, are the ones absorbing the cost.
There are counterpoints Eggers did not engage with in the reported remarks. Some educators have argued that generative AI, used well, can help students with dyslexia, non-native English speakers, and learners who struggle to get a first draft on the page. Whether those gains outweigh the composition losses Eggers described is an empirical question the field has not yet settled.
The episode says something about where the cultural fight over generative AI has landed. Two years in, the pushback is no longer coming primarily from rival technologists or regulators — it is coming from the writers, teachers, and artists whose work the models were trained on and whose students are now the test population. Altman's decision to hand one of them a microphone in front of his own staff suggests he understands that the argument will not be won by ignoring it.
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